The Sugar Season (24 page)

“Maine will make a lot, but I will have to pay the Federation price, or close to it. I’ve got sixty trailer loads there now. Fifty percent of my capital is already consumed.” Sixty trailer truckloads represented about $7.5 million worth of syrup at the bulk price.

Bruce took another look at the chart before he left for lunch. “We’ll be done by next Wednesday.” His prediction was two days beyond Kevin’s, for a finish on March 21.

I
HAD BEEN
to St. Zacharie to visit Robert Poirier nine months ago in June of 2011. At that time Robert was picking up syrup in Quebec and Maine and shipping it to New Hampshire.

St. Zacharie is eighty miles southeast of Quebec City and ten miles from the US border. The landscape around St. Zacharie is mostly forested, with far fewer fields than the prime agricultural regions further west and south of Montreal. The terrain is made up of long rolling hills and deep valleys. The primary roads are straight, and someone cresting over one hill can see miles ahead as the road sweeps down through a trough and maybe a village and then climbs up the next hill—the land resembles long sound waves with
low frequencies. Heavily loaded timber trucks barrel down those hills like roller coasters, and speed limits seem only a suggestion. St. Zacharie has a touch of the desolation of the upper latitudes. The scant apple trees bloom in June, and the fruit never really ripens. “It’s always winter here,” one syrup producer told me.

Before the recession and collapse of the housing market a few years ago, the lumber industry was booming. Bruce often talked about the logging and lumber trucks backed up three deep all day long at the single traffic light in St. Zacharie. Since then the population of St. Zacharie had dropped from 2200 to 1900 because of logging but also because the jeans factory closed and the work moved to Asia. The building where the factory was housed is now rented by Bruce Bascom.

Robert Poirier came late in life to the maple syrup game, but he was a quick study and had the proper beginnings. Robert started working in the woods early. He was one of twenty-three children. His parents could multiply but not fully provide, so at the age of eight Robert and a brother went to live at the farm of an aunt and uncle. Robert talked about getting 10 cents a day for working in the hay fields. He quit school at fifteen, and at seventeen he was working full time as a logger, making two dollars a day cutting pulpwood in the timberlands of Maine.

Robert did logging around Mount Katahdin for ten years and later ran his own logging company. He might have still been in that business had not a tree fallen too close and a limb hit him in the head. He walked out of the woods with his face covered with blood and drove himself to the hospital. After he recovered Robert looked for other work, finding
a part-time job as an assistant for someone who was buying maple syrup for Bruce Bascom. When Robert realized that the man was embezzling syrup, he told Bruce about it. Bruce fired the man and asked Robert to take his place.

Robert was about to find a true calling. He had taught himself to speak English and had a fine memory for the right details. When Bruce talked about Robert he would say that of the 150 syrup producers Robert dealt with in Maine and Quebec, he not only remembered their names but also the names of their children and grandchildren. Visiting the sugar camps and talking to the producers, the sucrier, he gradually assembled a large buying base. Robert’s workdays went all by memory, regarding the places he would go and the numbers of barrels he would find there. In 2011, when he turned sixty-nine, Robert told me he would work until his memory gave out. Bruce felt replacing Robert would be impossible and hoped he would work another twenty years.

Bruce described Robert’s temperament as hot and cold, which meant that he could get upset. Although Bruce was one to push up Robert’s mental temperature. In 2010, on my first trip with Bruce into Quebec, we spent a day visiting important people in the maple syrup business, partly so Sam Bascom, Bruce’s nephew, could meet them. We stopped at a Maple Grove facility, dropped in on Real Bureau, visited Guy Bolduc, toured a CDL evaporator factory, and stopped last of all at the warehouse in St. Zacharie. Robert met us first thing in the morning at a restaurant, and Bruce immediately needled Robert, telling him, with a smile, that he wanted Robert to “go slow” with his buying. Robert didn’t say anything in response, but he grew quiet. A couple of times more that day Bruce mentioned that Robert should go slow.

The final time was when we were in the warehouse standing near the tall stacks of barrels. Robert had bought 1.7 million pounds of syrup by then, at a price in the neighborhood of $4.5 million. He told me when I rode with him that his goal was to buy 2.1 million pounds, or about 191,000 gallons. In the warehouse they talked about the producers who had sent syrup, but then once again Bruce said, as we all heard, “Robert needs to go slow.” Robert went hot: “Bruce! You always tell me to go slow, but then you always tell me you don’t have enough sirop!” Sirop, the French word—Robert pronounced it melodically as
sear-rope,
making a trill on the Rs.

In 2011 I returned to Quebec on my own, making two trips that June to talk with Robert and collect syrup with him. Robert’s workday began early, at 4:30, when he rose to do paperwork, and he was usually at the warehouse by 6:30. I arrived at 7:30, thinking I was early. When I remarked about the length of Robert’s workday he said, “It’s good for Bruce.”

Robert’s feelings were tending toward the hot side again on this day. He had talked to Bruce and said to me, “I ask Bruce if he wants me to buy this sirop, and he says yes, but he keeps saying go slow. These people want their money. If I don’t buy their sirop, someone else will. I told Bruce, I won’t have to deal with this next year.” But I had the feeling he would.

Robert used a ten-wheel delivery truck to gather syrup. We soon left for Maine, for the St. Aurelie camps. St Aurelie is actually a town in Quebec, and the border crossing is there, but the area of the camps takes the same name. They are along the Baker Pond Road in timberlands in Somerset County, Maine. As we sat at the border crossing, waiting for
the guard to check my passport, Robert told me about when he worked here cutting pulpwood—not maples, they were sugaring in these woods then, but softwood, conifers. “In 1959, when I worked at this place, there were one hundred and fifty cars lined up on Monday mornings, with four to five hundred people waiting to cross the border and go work in the woods.”

People have made maple syrup in these woods for more than a hundred years. They were making syrup then on the Quebec side too, but these lands were used by people who didn’t have access to woods on the Quebec side and so ventured across the border. They established camps and then passed them, along with the leases from the timber companies for use of the land and trees, on to their families.

Baker Pond Road was well maintained but unpaved. On days when it rained they closed the road to keep the big trucks from breaking it up. “I never broke up the road,” Robert said. Moose tracks were along the road. We passed trashed-up open sites with piles of logs and went by sugar camps, some with several buildings. There were pump-houses and the webs of mainlines and tubing. The sugarbushes were all well groomed, all with the soft green shine of maple leaves on a clean understory.

As we passed a sugarbush Robert said, “That’s a small one, only twenty-five thousand taps.” Of another he said, “That has eighty-thousand taps.” I asked how many sugar camps were along this road. Robert said, “I can tell you,” and began counting, whispering to himself.

“Thirty-five,” he said.

Robert looks something like the actor Paul Newman, with light blue eyes and sculpted cheekbones, his gray hair swept
back, a kind of sweet mystery about him, and some shyness. He smiled with his eyes. After we drove several miles and had taken a fork in the road, with no signs along the way that I could recognize, I said it must be easy to get lost here. Robert looked as though I just didn’t know and told me more about working here as a teenager. He had four horses and took them into the woods, and he hired a feeder to take care of them. Other men used the horses too. They worked twelve-hour days cutting logs and hauling them to the road with the horses. They stayed out here for a week at a time and ate only the food they brought with them.

Robert told me that the sugarmaker we were about to see had been in the next bed when Robert was in the hospital after his accident in the woods, though Robert hadn’t remembered. One day they met on Baker Pond Road and stopped to talk, and the sugarmaker, whose name is Claude Morissette, told him he had been in the hospital with him. He told Robert he had heard rumors that he didn’t pay enough for syrup. There were many such rumors, Robert said; about eight years ago Bruce traveled to the St. Aurelie camps and a sugarmaker got mad at him about the price he paid for syrup.

We turned and drove through the woods to his place, and Robert said, “Claude has worked at this sugarbush for thirty-two years and built it up to forty thousand taps. He put all his profits from making sirop back into the business, and now he is making money for the first time. He made sirop with horses and buckets, then a tractor, and now tubing.”

Claude was happy to see Robert. He showed us around the place, taking us to a tool shed where he kept two very large generators, which provided all their electrical power.
We went into the sugarhouse and looked at his big evaporator, six feet wide and sixteen feet long, and we lingered over the map of his sugarbush, with the tubing lines stretching out into three zones in patterns like leaves. Claude showed us his cabin, a rustic but clean and comfortable-looking place, and said his wife stayed there with him during the syrup season. Claude was now putting on a fresh coat of paint. Robert backed the truck up to the storehouse, and with dollies they loaded on forty-eight barrels of syrup. The barrels were heavy, of course, weighing 600 pounds each, and Robert worked up a sweat.

We returned to the warehouse to unload the syrup. Robert had a full-time man at the warehouse named Bruno Guay, who went about unloading. A woman named Raymonde Lariviere worked recording drum weights and data needed for customs to cross the border. Robert also employed a truck driver who made the trips to Acworth.

While they worked I looked at the barrels. The warehouse was divided into two sections, and Robert kept Quebec or Federation syrup on one side and Maine syrup on another. Maine syrup was technically US syrup, and Robert inspected that himself before shipping it to New Hampshire. Federation inspectors graded the Quebec syrup. I enjoyed looking at the barrels and reading the names and places where the syrup had been made. They conveyed the breadth of the territory Robert covered and the trust he gained. The largest producer was in the village of Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire near the St. Lawrence—he owned his land, Robert said, and had 165,000 taps. He sent 501 barrels: “Five hundred plus one. He says it was a slow year.” Another sugarmaker had 100,000 taps. One group of sixty-eight stainless-steel barrels from
the town of La Frontiere, also near the St. Lawrence, would be shipped to Europe. Robert’s territory extended northward into the Gaspe Peninsula, an eight-hour drive away, a region, I was told, that had opened up to syrup production in the last twenty years with changes in the climate. And Robert’s territory extended into Maine, to the St. Aurelie camps and those along the Golden Road, which ran from the border to Jackman, Maine. Due to Robert’s efforts Bruce was the majority buyer in Somerset County, Maine.

When they finished unloading we got into the truck again and returned to the St. Aurelie camps. He made different turns this time and followed a road called the Dump Road, passing by camps, some with names, others with numbers, until we came to one with a sign that read, “Nadeau Sugar Camp.” Near the road was a log structure, green and mossy. “That’s an old sugarhouse,” Robert said. Further along appeared an opening and a building that looked like a house except for the tanks alongside and the mainlines running into it.

It had gray walls and a blue roof, a tall section that was a tank room, and a long single-story section that was the sugarhouse and, at the end, the living quarters. A woman came out to greet us, slender, middle-aged, pretty with reddish hair. Her name was Suzanne Nadeau, and she seemed eager to talk. She showed us inside. The evaporator was dismantled, with the pans removed, and was now serving as a workbench—Suzanne was making droplines, or “chutes,” when we arrived. They talked about the season, which for them was quite good. She showed us the calendar near the evaporator—they started boiling on March 17 and finished on April 28.

Suzanne said that her husband, Fernand, was in the woods with the tractor, but soon he came rumbling along and we went outside to load barrels. Fernand stayed on the tractor, using the bucket to lift the barrels with chains and a device that clamped on the upper rim of the barrels. Robert attached the chains to the barrels with a helper who followed from the warehouse. Suzanne and I watched, and she talked about their sugarbush.